Scientists have taken the idea of a film short down to new levels. Molecular levels.
IBM says it has made the tiniest stop-motion movie ever — a one-minute video of individual carbon monoxide molecules repeatedly rearranged to show a boy dancing, throwing a ball and bouncing on a trampoline.
Each frame measures 45 by 25 nanometers, but is hugely magnified. The movie (http://bit.ly/17ZmHIt) is reminiscent of early video games, particularly when the boy bounces the ball off the side of the frame accompanied by simple music and sound effects.
Photo: AFP
The movie is titled A Boy and His Atom.
Videos showing atoms in motion have been seen before, but Andreas Heinrich, IBM’s principal scientist for the project, said on Tuesday this is the first time anything so small has been maneuvered to tell a story.
“This movie is a fun way to share the atomic-scale world,” Heinrich said.
“The reason we made this was not to convey a scientific message directly, but to engage with students, to prompt them to ask questions,” he added.
Jamie Panas of Guinness World Records said Guinness certified the movie as “Smallest Stop-Motion Film.”
IBM used a remotely operated 1.8-tonne scanning tunneling microscope at its lab in San Jose, California, to make the movie earlier this year.
The microscope magnifies the surface more than 100 million times. It operates at minus-268°C.
The cold “makes life simpler for us,” Heinrich said. “The atoms hold still. They would move around on their own at room temperature.”
Scientists used the microscope to control a tiny, super-sharp needle along a copper surface, IBM said.
At a distance of just 1 nanometer, the needle physically attracted the carbon monoxide molecules and pulled them to a precisely specified location on the surface.
The dots that make up the figures in the movie are the oxygen atoms in the molecule, Heinrich said.
The scientists took 242 still images that make up the movie’s 242 frames.
Heinrich said the techniques used to make the movie are similar to what IBM is doing to make data storage smaller.
“As data creation and consumption continue to get bigger, data storage needs to get smaller, all the way down to the atomic level,” he said.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS